Page 46 of Broken

Chapter 19

A shocked murmur went around the room. They had all been speculating so long about what Thanatos was, nobody could believe they’d gotten an answer. Boomer got out his phone and started frantically texting.

“Mr. Hunter the younger,” Thanatos said. “Please put the phone away. There is plenty of time to learn which, if any, of your colleagues had their money on ‘Fae’ in the betting pool. I take it that it wasn’t you?”

Shit, Cole thought. He really did know everything that went on at the Ridge. Boomer rolled his eyes and put his phone in his pocket.

Thanatos went on, “You may be pleased to learn that there are a large number of creatures with Fae magic that fall under the Bright Fae’s definition of Dark Fae. So you can keep your pool open a little longer.”

Boomer’s face brightened, and his hand made a movement towards the pocket where he’d put the phone. Thanatos kept the hood pointed at him, and he dropped his hand.

Cole wasn’t interested in the pool right now, though he would have to find out if ‘troll’ was still in the running as a possibility. But Riker’s words were still burned into his brain.

“Next question,” he said. “Did you arrange to have Riker escape from prison?”

Another pause from Thanatos, and then, “Yes, I did.”

“What?” Boomer exploded. Karisma let out a feral growl, and wicked claws sprouted out of her fingertips. Black and white fur rippled across her face.

Gunn said, “Why the hell would you do a thing like that? Without telling us?” He and Mikey were both growling as well.

They had all risked their lives fighting against Maximilian and Riker, who’d been the right-hand man who did all the sorcerer’s dirty work for him. The idea that Thanatos had just let him go without even a heads-up got to all of them.

Thanatos said, “I believed he would lead me to the knowledge I had hoped to learn from Maximilian—knowledge that died with him when I killed him.” He turned his hood towards Boomer and Karisma.

“Killing him was necessary, in the circumstances.” Everyone in the room knew the ‘circumstances’ were that Maximilian had been holding a knife to Karisma’s throat, threatening her life. They also knew that Thanatos had sacrificed his mission objective to save her—although he hadn’t told them what that objective was.

“A thorough search of Maximilian’s notes, however, indicated that he did know that vital piece of information: the location of the person whose soul was trapped in the final sphere of the Orb of Thekate.”

Karisma hissed. She’d spent years with part of her soul trapped in a section of that same Orb—and Maximilian siphoning off her shifter magic for his own use through that connection, while secretly guiding her to find the other pieces of the Orb so he could take them from her.

Thanatos went on, “She has been held prisoner for a great many years. My intention is, as it has always been, to find her and release her.”

His words exploded into Cole’s mind. Thanatos’ mission was exactly what dream-Riker had said it was. Could he possibly have been talking to Riker’s spirit? Why would Riker choose him to haunt? Because he was Ireland’s Protector now, and he was hoping Cole would still undertake this mission?

No, he wouldn’t want to help Thanatos. On the other hand, why would he care what Thanatos let loose on the world? Riker had worked for plenty of evil bastards himself, and he hadn’t cared what the consequences to anyone else were.

So he wouldn’t have a stake in preventing Thanatos from doing anything, except out of sheer spitefulness. Which wasn’t out of the question.

According to Ireland, Riker had something he wanted to do with the Dark Book. If it wasn’t setting this woman free, then what was it?

Cole said, “Are the Bright Fae holding this woman? Why? What has she done?”

Thanatos turned to him. “She opposed them, Mr. Hunter. Long ago, when they divided the Fae, she was one of the strongest voices against them. She believed—and it has proved to be the case—that the Bright Fae are causing a rift in the fundamental magic of their world, which has a ripple effect in the worlds adjacent to it.”

Boomer chipped in here. “I think I speak for us all when I say, ‘what the hell are you talking about?’”

Thanatos gave a sigh. “Simply put, the energy of the universe is a balance of light and dark, which is not a value judgement but a description of the duality of the material world. Push/pull, rise/fall, yin/yang. Too much movement towards one side makes the other side more extreme as well.”

Mikey said softly, “The brighter the light, the darker the shadows?”

He gave a faint nod of the hood. “That is part of it. More important is the fact that no creature is wholly good or wholly evil, and, in fact, good and evil are subject to considerable interpretation. As the Bright Fae continued to emphasize and codify certain behaviors and beliefs, demanding that those they ruled adhere to an impossible standard, any beliefs or practices that went against their rules simply went underground. Bright Fae hid their unacceptable urges, vices and failings, indulging them only in secret. Eventually, it created a dark underbelly to the Bright Fae world that was worse than what they’d originally been fighting against.”

“Shocker,” Gunn said. “Like that doesn’t always happen with extremists?”

“Indeed,” Thanatos said. “And of course, a ruling class who interprets all their own beliefs and preferences as right and good, even divine, tends to develop excuses for doing the very things they claim to hate, supposedly in the service of the greater good.”

He turned once more to Ireland. “For example, they would feel justified in imprisoning a young Fae of shifter blood, taking away her choices and freedoms under the guise of protecting their society from the influence of tainted blood, trapping her magic and eventually using it for their own ends. They might even try to convince her that her shifter side was inherently evil. And they might condone violence and kidnapping to retrieve her if she escaped. They might even kill those who tried to protect her, despite their claim of holding all life to be sacred.”